


All Things Fall and Are Built Again

by anonymous_sibyl



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Character of Color, F/M, Helo ShAgathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-14
Updated: 2008-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-04 04:12:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_sibyl/pseuds/anonymous_sibyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"All perform their tragic play, / There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, / That's Ophelia, that Cordelia"</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Things Fall and Are Built Again

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Helo ShAgathon II](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/1158590.html?mode=reply) for [](http://resolute.livejournal.com/profile)[**resolute**](http://resolute.livejournal.com/) who wanted the one character Helo knows in his soul he can never have again. Title and summary from Lapis Lazuli by W.B. Yeats.
> 
> This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). None of the media or characters written about in my fanfiction belong to me and I make no profit from these works.

With so little crew everyone is always doing more than one job and is always tired. Her shift is over, his nearly so, and it's rare for her to seek him out like this instead of returning to her quarters and spending what time she can with Lee. "How's your husband?"

"The same," she answers. "How's your wife?"

"Still a Cylon."

She nods while she loosens the top buttons on her uniform. "Lee's still fat."

He stifles his laughter. He's got some loyalty toward Lee, after all, despite this, and much more toward Sharon. "Cylon wasn't a complaint."

"Neither was fat." She fiddles with a lower button. "If I were complaining, I'd call him a coward."

He hates this, hates the measuring and the impatience, and the way nothing is ever right or easy. "Dee."

"Don't scold me, Karl. You don't live with him."

He tucks the memos under his arm, then, feeling them slip and giving up all pretense of working, lets them fall to the ground. "It's living with him that's the problem?"

"It's living without the him I used to know that's the problem."

"Cylon," he says again. He doesn't need to say anything else. Maybe he should, though. Maybe someday there will be something he can say, something that should be said. And maybe he isn't supposed to say it to just Dee.

"This is so hard," she says out of the blue, leaning against the nearest raptor. "And I'm tired, Karl. Tired of it all."

"What else can we do but go on?"

Dee shakes her head. "You think I'm talking about the war, don't you?"

"You aren't?"

"I'm talking about us!" she bursts out. "You and me! I'm talking about whatever this is that we're doing, sneaking around behind their backs. Gods," she says, half-laughing, "your wife could kill me."

"We aren't doing anything wrong," he says softly. He can feel her waiting for him to do or say something more, but all he can seem to do is look at his hands. They're big. His mother used to call them capable, used to brag about how her son could soothe any animal and mend any broken thing. He's very far from the boy with the hands too big for his body, and very far from being able to soothe or fix anything. "We've never done anything wrong."

"Of course not."

She's twisting her hands in front of her. He wonders if she has some childhood memory concerning them, maybe planting flowers or touching her mother's hair. He should ask. He should know.

"Do you… do you want to?" Dee doesn't answer right away and that scares him. He shouldn't have asked, shouldn't have blundered into this in his big, clumsy way. She's going to turn and walk away from him and that's the end of that.

"I can see you thinking it."

He exhales in relief. As long as she's talking she isn't leaving. "What?"

"That you said something wrong."

"Did I?"

"No." He's still watching her hands when she extends one toward him. "Absolutely not."

"Okay, then." He doesn't ask her if she loves Lee, she doesn't ask that about Sharon. They're far too civilized for that, too polite and refined, and he is far too interested in how her hand feels wrapped around his tight collar, fingers brushing the flesh at his throat.

"I'm tired," she murmurs, stepping slightly closer to him, closer than she's stepped in all these months they've been playing at being friends. "I'm so tired."

His collar feels strangely tight and his hand brushes hers when he opens it.

"Let me," she says.

He does. He lets her unbutton his jacket and push it off his shoulders. He lets her turn him and press him into the raptor she'd been leaning on. He lets her do anything she wants and pretends it's giving in and not giving up.

He shivers, in anticipation, excitement, or guilt. That's the way it always is with Dee. He told her they weren't doing anything wrong, but he knows they are and always have been. The way he feels when she's near him, or when he's near Lee, proves that.

She's so tiny next to him, he's almost looking down on her, and that makes him feel badly, as if he's placing himself above her, so he focuses on his hands again. There's something strange about them or the way he's holding them. He stares harder at them, looking for clues.

"Karl?" She looks up at him and when he meets her gaze he can see the question there. "You won't touch me. Why won't you touch me?"

Oh, that's what was wrong. His hands were hanging near her, so close he could feel the heat rising off her body, but he hadn't touched her. "I never thought I could."

Another woman might have pitied him in that moment, taken his hesitation for feelings of unworthiness, but Dee laughs because she knows he simply never thought it. They've never touched like this before, not once, and he forgot they weren't still playing the game of lingering glances and long conversations.

It's better when he puts his hands on her, his big hands on her tiny hips, and better still when he pulls her closer to him. He has to stoop to kiss her, and it hurts his neck. It'd be dramatic and exciting to pick her up in his arms and boost her into the raptor, but unauthorized personnel in those is frowned upon, and he likes to obey the rules as much as she does. He slips to the floor and she follows him without asking, turning so that she's on her knees facing him and, finally, their mouths are at the same level.

He's looking at his hands again, thinking how right they look next to Dee, when he hears the noise. He looks up to see Sharon walking away and he knows that his mother was wrong and that his big hands can never mend the things they break.


End file.
